Bramble Hill Farm

Bramble Hill Farm provides living and working spaces for a range of people and projects that test innovative ways to build a sustainable, healthy, and creative farm centered community that benefits the broader population.

The 120 acre farm is located in Amherst, MA and is supported by the Open Field Foundation.

Mission & History

Bramble
Hill Farm is a 120 acre former dairy farm in Amherst, MA. The old farm
buildings have been carefully renovated during the past ten years to provide
living and working spaces for a range of people and projects. A new set of farm
structures have been built to support several pasture based livestock
initiatives and a range of organic growing programs. The Open Field Foundation, a nonprofit
corporation which was created to legally hold the assets of the Farm, has
absorbed the major capital costs of this project to date. The goal of The
Foundation and the Farm is to test innovative ways to build a sustainable,
healthy, creative farm centered community, accessible to and interactive with
the larger community which surrounds it.
Bramble
Hill Farm is very much a work in process. Each piece of the Farm has the
potential to be developed in a myriad of ways. The form this development takes
is determined in large part by the people and enterprises working and living
there. The Foundation believes in the “value” of diversity to provide
creativity and market stability, and the value of relationship to encourage
diversity.
The
Land was certified organic in 1998 – 2002, and although certification has not
been renewed, nothing has occurred which would compromise certification again
in the future.
The
Farm shares a border with The Hitchcock Center (an Environmental Education
Center) and the Common School ( a private K – 6 elementary school with a
curriculum based on “in-depth studies and experiential learning”). Amherst
College maintains several hundred acres of pasture land across Rt. 116 from the
Farm, and the Town Conservation Commission maintains land along another Border.
In 2004 the Larch Hill Collaborative was formed, with Bramble Hill Farm at the
center, to bring these entities together into a working group around shared
concerns for the sustainability of the land and the ecosystems which form the
core of all of our individual work. The Farm welcomes projects and classes from
The Hitchcock Center, The Common School, and other groups interested in
learning about and creating from its’ diverse resources.